The Crime Studio (9 page)

Billy Panacea, burglar extraordinaire, broke out of the state pen disguised as his mother. The escape occurred during the metalshop open day - Billy unveiled a giant steel effigy of Lenin and in the ensuing uproar Billy and his Ma switched garb and Billy walked out as happy and free as a lark. The plan ended there and it was as he entered the Delayed Reaction that Billy remembered his Ma. Ma Panacea found herself locked in the state pen unable to convince anyone she wasn’t Billy Panacea but Billy Panacea’s mother.

‘Ah, quit foolin’ Billy,’ shouted her cellmates. ‘You wanted to sail that notion why didn’t you swap clothes with your Ma durin’ the Lenin riot?’ And they began to laugh.

Meanwhile in the Delayed Reaction Bar, Don Toto the barman was squinting and hesitant. ‘Is that you, Ma Panacea? Billy aint here, he’s in the state pen, remember?’

‘I
am
Billy,’ whispered Billy Panacea. ‘Gimme a scotch with everything in it.’

‘Billy Panacea you sick dog, your sweet mother won’t take kindly to you donning a dress and getting blurred in the afternoon.’

‘Ma Panacea is in the state pen,’ Billy explained, ‘and I cannot afford to be seen drunk or sober in my own garb. I must pass myself off as Ma till I figure a plan to bust her out. What kind of tricks does Ma get up to these days?’

Toto told Billy that Ma Panacea was due to judge the bakery contest that very afternoon. Billy threw back his scotch and bolted out of the bar before anyone could knife him to a stop.

Billy selected a cake which had clearly collapsed in despair. ‘This cake,’ he announced to the assembled hags, gesturing at the blunder, ‘is the most excellent item I have ever confronted. In fact I fully and clearly intend to take it home and swallow it, before it rises.’

In the visiting room the following day, Billy slipped the cake under the partition. ‘Here, Ma - save it for later.’

‘The hell I will.’

‘There is a file in the pie, you sick old woman.’

‘Trying to poison me eh?’ she nodded without surprise. ‘With a lump of metal. You never were one for subtlety, William.’

‘Don’t call me William, Ma,’ whispered Billy, ‘or I’ll bust you in the eye.’

‘Killing your Ma while dressed in her summer clothes. You sure are the last word in perversity.’

‘Shut your face a minute, Ma,’ said Billy with a hushed urgency, glancing at a guard. ‘I intend to blast you out of here with a quantity of dynamite which will surprise everyone. In three days you will receive delivery of a large, hardbound Updike novel. The guards will not examine this, knowing it cannot contain anything of interest. Between the boards you will find the quantity of sherbet to which I have just alluded, and with which you will minimise the east wall.’

However, when the time came the guards were so uninterested they tossed the novel into the incinerator, causing a blast which gutted the postroom.

So Billy advised his Ma to construct a huge DNA helix during metalshop and utilise it as a ladder to an upper window. Due to the controversy over Billy’s last exhibit, Ma Panacea was forced to undertake a patriotic subject as an act of atonement - so she made the DNA that of a hardline Republican senator, only to find that the genetic irregularities involved rendered the helix unusable as a climbing frame.

So Billy set up a Noah break. By releasing twenty berserking apes into a slammer it is simple enough for the escapee, disguised as a chimp, to be rounded up and shipped out with the general herd. But inevitably bad communication led Ma Panacea to create a walrus outfit instead of that of the appropriate animal, thus appearing limpidly conspicuous amid the shrieking primates.

Billy gave up and resolved to get himself caught. He carried out a jewel robbery which only he could have performed, involving infra-red scanning, knee-hanging acrobatics above a pressure-sensitive floor, computer hacking through a gauntlet of alarm systems and a take-off from a domed roof in a prefab autogiro. When he headed out to confess the next morning he found that Joe Solitary had already claimed applause for the job, his beaming visage splashed across the front pages. He had wasted a robbery and couldn’t afford the rap for more.

Billy was tired and angry at having to conduct business dressed as his mother - he’d trip on the garb and drop his burglar tools, sliding down the roof and into a lawnpool or the porch of a doghouse. He decided to go about as a priest for a while - at least this way he could wear black and beg for mercy without arousing suspicion. It was lucky he used this disguise next time he visited his Ma, as it seemed someone had got his description as he fell from a roof one evening and Ma Panacea was now wanted for housebreaking.

‘Thank you William,’ said his mother in the visiting room. ‘Required dead or alive by the cops and here I am in the state pen.’

‘Pretend you’re confessing, Ma,’ hissed Billy.

‘I don’t need to pretend, William. I confess I’d like to slaughter you at the nearest and dearest opportunity.’

‘That’s good, Ma - don’t lose heart. I’ll have you out of here before you can say knife.’

‘Knife, William.’

‘That’s the spirit, Ma,’ chuckled Billy, getting up to leave.

The plan was this. Billy would pose as the head of an experimental theatre group and blast her out during an in-stir performance of a play entitled
Billy’s Ma Busts Out of the Facility Just When They Least Expect It.
This scheme had been a last resort for escapees since Leon Wardial printed a blueprint text under the title
[state name] Busts Out of [state premises] [Without Warning/Bang On Time/In a Hurry/Real Slow/Other].
Wardial had seen nothing irresponsible in the publication, knowing there is no such thing as a dangerous book. For the most part, the play is a stark conversation piece. The set consists of a kitchen, the backdrop of which covers a pen wall of no more than two feet thickness with a blast-through access to the free world. There’s a table, chairs and a stove at the rear. A handful of mild-mannered characters enter and begin to discuss the whole question of ethics in modern society. One amicably suggests that crime will cease when people no longer feel a need for it, and he is roundly condemned. The question boils down to a jokey experiment to determine how the day’s environment effects the average Joe. A volunteer from the audience is asked to climb into the oven. As soon as the volunteer is out of sight, there is an explosion of activity on stage - brawls erupt, characters laugh and yell out of context, honking clowns appear in miniature cars, farts are ignited, strippers of every sex burst into view, Ambrose Bierce is exhumed from a soilbag, some kind of election takes place, guns are blasted over the heads of the audience - anything and everything to distract the onlookers from the sap in the oven. Behind the stove, explosive bolts have been fired, blowing a hole in the wall - by the time the warden recognises that the play is not legitimate even by east coast standards, the escapee is springing over the state line.

The work had been performed twice before, but by players so stricken with panic and stress that the text had been either forgotten or delivered in unearthly, warbling shrieks. Billy was sure that a controlled performance would not ring alarm bells.

Yet Billy’s Ma had quickly become a popular figure in stir by teaching all and sundry a blackjack scam counting tens to plus and minus round a zero base. The whole point of the oven stunt was that only someone in the know would volunteer - but when the time came a couple of dozen convicts stepped up. Ma Panacea had told all her new pals about the break and she herself wasn’t going till they were safely on the outside. Billy had to wing it, ushering a string of inmates through the confetti-blasted onstage bedlam. Clowns repeatedly hurled themselves at the stove in a sobbing attempt to conceal the flapping false door. By the time Ma Panacea had crawled to freedom, the audience had been treated to the most baffling spectacle since Chaplin attempted jest. Billy dropped a gas grenade, waved goodbye and climbed into the oven.

The symbolic implications of these events have been the subject of endless debate, not least because there was not a single legitimate convict among the escapees. All twenty-seven were convicts’ mothers.

Nature hates a vacuum and tends to fill it with the standing idle. In this regard, Jesse Downtime was amid the throng but not of the throng. Sure, he once fell asleep while he was surfing, he used his only nervous thought to shave the stubble from his chin and his conversation was time-lagged as though beamed via satellite. But that didn’t mean he wasn’t up to anything. Jesse was an ambient, a specialist among the goons and antidudes who used the city as a crime studio. In fact he had honed his villainy to such an art he was practically innocent.

The road to Jesse’s vocation was thorny and progressively narrow. His regular thieving career had been as shortlived as an epileptic snake-handler. Jesse believed that indiscriminate theft was an expressive species of religious abandon. He knew material wealth couldn’t be taken with you when you die, so he made sure he was never shot as he fled the crime scene. But he hadn’t the first idea how to raid a store - he figured it was common practice to just swan in and then stagger out under the weight of the register, sustaining double hernias and vessel-busts at which doctors marvelled and repeated the word ‘textbook’ over and over. He never neglected to wear a mask, but always chose the same one - storekeepers would hit the alarm the instant Daffy pranced in. He thought of becoming a good old-fashioned pickpocket. Pickpockets generally avoid Beerlight for fear of laying hands on the sodden and boss-eyed lungfish which denizens carry as a deterrent, though minimal research revealed to Jesse that many such denizens had forgotten the motive for this practice. There was a gap in the market - but the first victim Jesse dipped was walking so fast Jesse tore off his pants. He returned to shoplifting and began to boost midsize hardware items such as sheetglass and cans of primary vinyl. He tried smashing the glass and walking out with the pieces clinking in his coatpockets. He tried drinking the paint and flattening the cans, but the security guy would become instantly apprised and unsympathetic as Jesse began to gag and point at the can-stacks. The old scams never worked for Jesse and so he set upon a methodical course of experimentation. Individual licks of paint would leave the hardware store, clinging to Jesse’s shirt. Outside, he would explode with hilarity and mischief. He tore the stalk from an apple at the deli and bolted, turning a corner and adopting a casual gait as, sniggering, he passed a cop. The loot became smaller and smaller. He began swiping lint from affronted strangers. He hacked a single bladder-pimple from a seaweed drift and fled the bay in a Cherokee jeep. He nocturnally vaulted into the state zoo and kidnapped a young ant from some undergrowth near the chimps. Then he returned it uninjured to the baffled authorities with a note taped to the matchbox: ‘NOTHING COULD BE EASIER, LOSERS’. No one could believe or detect his daring. He could steal the angels from the head of a pin. Even his aura was not his own. He’d stumble into people on the street, acquiring dozens of their atoms without suspicion. Crossing the Mexican border, nobody suspected he was smuggling salty tears within his concealing head. A pioneer of the small but perfectly-formed offence, he was abruptly arrested in a restaurant on
Dive Street
, his nose packed full of sub-atomic particles. By the time Jesse was released, he had refined his crimes to such a degree that they occurred only as electrical impulses at the synapses of his brain. Surely no one could tell him what to think?

But this was
America
.

Aunt Maggot died in violent and hilarious circumstances over which I will sling a veil - what is important is that she left behind a fortune to a tune which burst the eardrums of the Beerlight community. Maggot’s riches surprised her associates for she was thought to be as honest as a high summer day. Billy Panacea, burglar extraordinaire, wept openly when he heard the news. But it seemed he and others were to have a shot at the cash anyway, as Maggot had written half a dozen bigots into her will. Billy was her nephew but the rest only knew her as Billy’s aunt and had tried, in their way, to treat her with respect. The will was a creepy notion as Maggot was a believer in the afterlife and had once attempted to contact her late husband through a masseur. Billy, Parker, Toto, Harpoon, Bleach and Gilbert Wham assembled in the oakpanelled office of Maggot’s attorney. Parker wore a suit. The group sat around the table feeling as comfortable as a giraffe in a trashcan.

The attorney, Mr Pert, was an expensive relic of his former self. He was the type who would act all high and mighty and then eat something too hot and end up drinking out of a vase. The rogue’s gallery before him seemed to be attired in garments raided from the dead. As he regarded them, he bade a fond farewell to the flickering wraith of his reputation.

‘Despite all that’s holy,’ he announced, ‘I shall now read what I can only describe as the last will and testament of Maggot Stone.’ He shot a glance of distaste at the assembly, and began.

‘I guess I kicked the can and can’t tell you how relieved I am to have found safe haven in the devil’s abyss, where I can at least be assured of conversation conducted boldly and clearly, and where events occur according to reliably consistent principles. The disappointment and mayhem I suffered at your hands has been thrown into stark relief by this trivial inferno.

‘Billy Panacea, mutant nephew - you are perched harpy-like on the brink of oblivion. I’ve known it since the christening, when your shades fell into the font. I have followed your subsequent career with horror and disquiet, not to mention a certain grandeur. You live your life like a waiter in a windtunnel. I wish I could punch the scales from your eyes. A fat lot of good this uncoordinated marauding will do when you no longer have your poor, querulous Ma to bust you out of the slammer.

‘Brute Parker. Are there any sadder words in the English language? Propping up the gun cupboard, your barely articulate crowing makes you as pleasant for company as a jerrybuilt barrage balloon. In the entire course of your thirty-eight years you have never used a verb. You joined this species by the seat of your pants. I advise you to administer a bullet to your straining head. There’s not a moment to lose.

‘Mr Specter, you and I were never on friendly terms, and no wonder. I have lost count of those who have stood accused in the perjury room, hoping for representation of the exceptional calibre required when one is truly blameless, only to be confronted with you, a man medically certified as a quadruped. Your corroded wits are responsible for almost twenty-three percent of the misery in this state. At any given moment the killing jar is full to bursting with your clients, their faces flattened and distorted against the glass. For all they know you could be a penniless Sicilian organ-grinder. If you had a speck of honesty you’d flick it off your sleeve.

‘Bleach Pastiche, your sanity is damaged below the waterline. You conduct your affairs with a comprehensive insolence and an almost chef-like disregard for morals and human life. The same goes for that clown who follows you around like an atomic shadow. The attraction is clearly pathological. You are nothing short of a berserk, exterminating bitch.

‘Gilbert Wham, you first came to my attention when you upset a gong in the Shonen Restaurant on
Chain Street
. I forgot about you immediately, until just now. You’re bone idle, and more than anything resemble a chemically-altered herring.

‘I have less charity for you, Mr Toto. I confronted a burger at the Reaction Bar and felt as sick as a stoat. The regulars watched me as though awaiting an explosion. For days I suffered a malady which the experts could not identify, after which I returned to the bar to give you a damn good thrashing. Yet looking about me I perceived many less fortunate than myself - one was biting down on something which had the appearance and consistency of a poolside flotation toy, and another was screaming as though possessed. These are your people. In the journey from childhood to adolescence and back again, any principles you once held dear have dissolved like a tylenol. Your ghastly career is fuelled by macabre refreshments and deviant medicine, openly swallowed through a lab funnel. You are at your quietest when thinking aloud. I have it on good authority that your very existence is flatly illegal.’

Here she digressed briefly, cursing church and state, claiming a role in some minor shootings, pledging honour to the Reich and so on. Returning to the matter: ‘Let’s speak plainly - you are bastards to a man. This town is glassy-eyed with your felonies. You shore up your vacuity with a cop-baiting, dead-end-kid bravado. Your loyalties are misplaced and exclusive, and there is no telling where you will strike next. I have loathed your tusken features ever since you burst screaming through the fabric of our society, and now, as my remains sink below room temperature, I detest you all the more.’

Here the crescendo of allegations roof-rolled to a stop.

The Beretta crew, who thus far had gazed on as though preserved in borax, began to shift uncertainly. Glances collided and ricocheted at speed. Billy spectated the ceiling.

Finally, Parker broke the silence.

‘When you’re right, you’re right,’ he muttered, raising his eyebrows.

Before anyone could reply, the attorney turned a page.

‘And as for the bequest,’ he read: ‘You’ll pretend with translucent predictability that your presence here is entirely altruistic, but I’ll have you know as well as I do you’d turn up naked and draped in a python if there were smackers at stake. And there are. My entire fortune I bequeath to whichever one of you boggle-eyed aberrations manages to stay alive and kicking for precisely one week. That is all.’

It was like feeding a percussion cap to a ruminant. Voices and guns were simultaneously raised in an obliterative frenzy which tore the office to pieces. Even the mildest among them began to shriek like some bearded, blaspheming castaway. Mr Pert looked on with an expression as withering as the tree of life as the assembled louts embarked on a murderous bonanza, each spending ammo in inverse proportion to his intelligence.

They piled into the street baying like firehouse dogs, and over subsequent days the town bristled with sniper activity. Beetling along roof-edges, the potential beneficiaries tendered a volley of rounds for one another’s consideration. Ventilation was not only desired but seemed economically unavoidable.

Yet ballistic dexterity was not enough when they began hiding out in the sewers, and after a week everyone was still in bounding health despite the best efforts of their friends and associates.

It took this long for the truth to crash home - they had been firing in the wrong direction.

Pooling their perceptions, all six agreed that the will they had heard was not the one they were familiar with. Pert must have rumbled everything immediately - even a cursory glance at the original would have revealed a mosaic of deceit and corruption.

Billy had been the first to spin-dry the safe and alter the will. He had described himself therein as strenuously pious despite every circumstance and the one worthy heir. Billy had also boosted the cash from Maggot’s account so as to be recompensed twice and excised the reference to his mother. Gilbert Wham had rolled and sold Maggot’s vintage auto and inherited the insurance and fortune in his draft of the bequest. Billy had re-stolen the auto but in Bleach’s draft Aunt Maggot claimed ownership of all Billy’s property and bequeathed it to Bleach as well as implicating Parker in three homicides for which Bleach was responsible. The amendment leaving everything to Parker was written in yellow crayon and included references to a cache of ammo-guzzlers allegedly buried on the Maggot estate. Don Toto had busted in with Billy’s old gang and amended Maggot’s remarks in regard to his establishment, saying she ‘loved the burger’. He’d get it all plus her posthumous nomination for his election to Mayor. This Harpoon amended to ‘bricklayer’ and as well as arranging his own affluent inheritance he attached a rider laying out in finely-crafted detail a scam to embezzle eight million smackers from the federal mint, which sum was to fund the construction of a monument to his sexual prowess. In addition to this he required a trouble-free seat in the House of Representatives and round-the-clock access to his drug of choice. As a legalistic afterthought he amended ‘burger’ to ‘rat’.

Throughout the reading it had dawned on various parties that their amendments had not gone through. In reality they had rendered the will as void as a scooped landcrab and, seeing his opportunity, Pert had leapt at it with speed-stretched features. His reading of an unamended copy was intended to buy time - he knew they’d go at each other like scorpions in a bottle, the conflict fanned by the assumption that one among them had switched the wills at the eleventh hour.

The crew bolted to Pert’s office but the bastard had flown. The janitor said he’d seen him go off in a limo, shouting with laughter. Said it was great to see a guy enjoying his retirement. He’d be decanting into the Congo basin by now and they could hardly bleat to the cops. While Specter viewed the scam with frank admiration, the others felt a writhing convolution of fury and respect. The brainer was that they’d followed Maggot’s difficult instructions even as the fortune was leaving the country.

Behind locked doors at the Delayed Reaction, the group downed a vat of highgrade and considered their position. As night crept past and daylight trickled in like medication, all became horribly clear. Maggot had them bang to rights - they were the biggest morons this side of the fossil gap.